CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
user2963882
user2963882

Reputation: 627

R converting twitter created_at string to time

I am trying to convert the created_at string but it returns NA

as.POSIXct("Tue Jun 07 23:27:12 +0000 2016", format="%a %b %d %H:%M:%S +0000 %Y", tz="GMT")
[1] NA

Any idea what's going wrong, seems fairly straightforward!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1589

Answers (2)

celacanto
celacanto

Reputation: 315

a solution that doesn't involve changing your locale

library(dplyr)
library(magrittr)

twitter_to_POSIXct <- function(x, timezone = Sys.timezone()){

  x %>% 
    strsplit("\\s+") %>% 
    unlist %>% 
    t %>% 
    as.data.frame(stringsAsFactors = FALSE) %>% 
    set_colnames(c("week_day", "month_abb", 
                   "day", "hour", "tz", 
                   "year")) %>%
    mutate(month_num = which(month.abb %in% month_abb)) %>% 
    mutate(date_str = paste0(year, "-", month_num, "-", day, " ", 
                             hour)) %>% 
    mutate(date = format(as.POSIXct(date_str, tz = tz), 
                         tz = timezone)) %>%
    pull(date)

}

twitter_to_POSIXct("Tue Jun 07 23:27:12 +0000 2016")

Upvotes: 0

Roman Luštrik
Roman Luštrik

Reputation: 70643

Conversion of dates depends on your locale. For me, this is Slovene, so your case doesn't work.

> as.POSIXct("Tue Jun 07 23:27:12 +0000 2016", format="%a %b %d %H:%M:%S +0000 %Y", tz="GMT")
[1] NA

However, if I change the date to Slovene (Tor = torek = Tuesday)

> as.POSIXct("Tor Jun 07 23:27:12 +0000 2016", format="%a %b %d %H:%M:%S +0000 %Y", tz="GMT")
[1] "2016-06-07 23:27:12 GMT"

In short, change your locale to English and you're set.

> Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "English")
[1] "English_United States.1252"
> as.POSIXct("Tue Jun 07 23:27:12 +0000 2016", format="%a %b %d %H:%M:%S +0000 %Y", tz="GMT")
[1] "2016-06-07 23:27:12 GMT"

Upvotes: 3

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